


the season of coming home

by SunCrossed



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 10:39:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8575126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunCrossed/pseuds/SunCrossed
Summary: The day your mother died, you and Mulder had gone to that beach that you used to like to go to sometimes, back when the sun still shone.  
You had cried and he had let you.  You had called him Fox and it felt foreign on your tongue but also appropriate.  You had looked out into the water and wondered how the horizon could seem so far away when you were reminded—constantly, over and over again—how finite everything really was.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In response to the following prompt: mango, the color blue, jump. setting: unremarkable house, sometime in season 10. 
> 
> This is set post-Home Again, because I love to pick at wounds until they bleed.

You had not planned to go to the house. But at the grocery store, you absentmindedly put all of his usual grocery items in your cart; even though you had left (had to leave, chose to leave) him two years ago, grocery shopping is muscle memory after you’ve lived with someone for so long. Coffee—bold beans—but also whole milk, sugar to sweeten the bitterness. Cereal: he is the only person you know who likes raisin bran. You distractedly wonder if he still likes teriyaki salmon. One summer, he had put it on the grill almost every night. Surely, he must be sick of it by now, but you put it into your cart anyway, just in case. You grab a mango from the produce section. It is not quite summer yet, the mangoes are not quite in season, but they will be soon.  
You do not cry in the middle of the grocery store.

Your mother is dead. It is, strangely, a sentence you never believed you would say. A long time ago someone had told you that you were immortal, but it was your mother who had always remained standing while everyone else around you had fallen.  
Even Mulder had left you many times: left you to pursue hunches, left you in random police stations, had died, been buried, had come back to life, had gone into hiding. Had returned, only to leave you again when he retreated into his own mind, the one place you could not find him, no matter how hard you tried. (You never blame him, though. It has never been that black and white, that polka-dotted life of yours.) 

Your mother had never left, but now, somehow, she is gone.

You suppose that may be why you end up driving to the outer border of Virginia.

* * * * * * * * * * 

The house on the outer border of Virginia had once been your home, too. It was nothing to look at and it was nothing like anywhere Mulder had ever lived; his family was wealthy and had always lived in beautiful homes. But he was the one who found it in the real estate section. He had excitedly suggested that the two of you go to see it. 

The shingles were broken, it seemed like every door frame was low and crooked, the wood floors were uneven and full of splinters and would definitely, definitely have to be pulled up. When you went to see it, the house was painted bright blue.

Mulder, you had told him, the color blue of the house borders on offensive.

He had laughed; you bought it together, in cash, to minimize the paper trail; it was home right away. 

People always assumed that you had gone into hiding somewhere far away, across the country maybe, that you had changed your names and died your hair blonde and that he had lost ten pounds to disguise himself. But you were still Dana Katherine Scully, he was still Fox William Mulder, you were still a doctor, your hair was still red. You let your hair grow long and he grew a beard but it was only because you were both finally free, or so you thought. 

And for years you lived together in that ordinary house. You went to Home Depot together, spent hours laughing, trying to find a paint color even uglier than the blue. You’d finally settled on white: classic, unassuming. You’d let the wood panels on the side of the house go untreated. 

Mulder painted the house during the day while you were at work at the hospital. At night you would come home and put food on the grill together and eat ice cream on the floor and read in bed. 

He still loved those terrible sci-fi movies. Secretly, they had always creeped you out a little bit, but it turned out that when you watched them together in bed they weren’t so bad.

* * * * * * * * * * * 

On the drive from the supermarket to the house on the outer border of Virginia you do not think about the reasons why you left him.

You do not think about how one winter it was so cold and dark and you stopped grilling together and you could not eat ice cream on the floor. It was so cold and so dark that winter and you needed to talk about William but it was too painful, for both of you. You couldn’t get warm even sitting next to the fireplace, and you wanted to ask him if he blamed you for giving William up but you were afraid his answer would be a lie.

* * * * * * * * * * *

When you were fourteen, you had gone to a week-long sleep-away camp. You had always been extremely independent, and it never crossed your mind that you wouldn’t love it. You certainly didn’t expect to cry when your parents drove out of the parking lot. You did not expect to beg your counselor every night to let you use the camp phone to call home.

Your counselor had hugged you on the second night, and told you, “It’s okay, you’re just homesick.” 

“It’ll pass,” she had promised.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The day your mother died, you and Mulder had gone to that beach that you used to like to go to sometimes, back when the sun still shone. 

You had cried and he had let you. You had called him Fox and it felt foreign on your tongue but also appropriate. You had looked out into the water and wondered how the horizon could seem so far away when you were reminded—constantly, over and over again—how finite everything really was. 

But then you’d gotten up, shaken the sand and rocks from your shoes, and hugged him. You had driven back to your apartment in Georgetown, the one you moved to after you left him. (It was not painted blue; it did not feel like home.)

Bill’s plane had finally landed, and he’d come over. The two of you started to make funeral arrangements; you kept thinking you should call your mother to ask for input. It felt like a cold bucket of water to the face each time you remembered that she was the one you would have to leave behind at the funeral home.

The feeling in your stomach is akin to homesickness. You are afraid it will not pass. 

* * * * * * * * * * *

On the drive to the house on the outer border of Virginia you do not think about the day Mulder read “The Things They Carried,” or about how you had been sitting next to him on the porch as he read but might as well have been a million miles away. 

You do not think about how he had, out of the blue, read aloud a passage from the book: “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.” 

Back then, the two of you could not figure out how to carry the gravity. The gravity was tethering you to the Earth, it was slowly burying you deeper and deeper underground –

You do not let yourself remember any of it.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Once, when you were a little girl, you had gotten lost at a department store while shopping with your mother. Your mother, apparently, had panicked and gotten a security guard, and they had searched high and low for you.

She had finally found you playing underneath a display. You never even realized you were lost at all.

When you got home, she had made you hot chocolate and you had sat down at the table together, and she had repeated the home phone number to you until it was seared into your brain.

This way, she had told you, if you ever get lost again, you’ll know how to find your way home.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The keys to the no-longer-blue house are still on your keychain. You’d thought about taking them off, but it had been too painful. You can’t remember a time when Mulder’s keys weren’t on your keychain, actually. The first week you two worked together, he had slipped you the key to his apartment. He was matter-of-fact about it: “In case anything ever happens to me, please feed my fish.” 

You try not to admit that part of the reason why you have kept the keys to the house is because you worry constantly that someday soon you will have to feed his fish.

* * * * * * * * * * *

When you arrive at the house, the door is unlocked. Mulder is sitting at the kitchen table, paying bills; perhaps he is waiting for you.

You put the groceries on the table and breathe in. Something is on the grill, but it does not smell like teriyaki salmon. 

You exhale. Words tumble out of your mouth before you have even thought about them: “We used to play this game that my mother hated, me and Charlie and Bill and Melissa. We would go on the swings, see who could go the highest, and someone would yell ‘Jump!’ and we would all fling ourselves off.” 

You remember the world whizzing by as you flew off the swing.

“And it’s one of those things that always just stayed with me,” you continue. “Whenever I pictured having a child, a home, that’s what I picture: William jumping off the swing, and us there to catch him.”

He stands up, gently places his hand on your face; the world whizzes by you, once again. You tell him: “I don’t know how to live in a world with no mother and no child and no home.”

“I guess,” he says, “we have to remember how to catch one another.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

You don’t stay that night, but you wonder if you will someday soon.

On the drive back to your apartment, you think about Mulder and all of the different people he is and all of the different people he has been over the years. He is a warm sweater, one thread from unraveling, always. He is bullet-proof armor, has faced every challenge, has lived through it every time. 

He is the one person who has known you from the beginning, who has seen every side of you, who is still standing, who has left many times but who has always come back. He is the one person who knows the older version of you—the one before all of the loss and the pain—and also where you buried her. 

Homesickness comes in many forms, you think. You fervently wish that there were a medical cure for it. You wonder if, perhaps, the closest thing to a cure has been living in this not-blue-anymore house all along.


End file.
